ONGC to invest Rs 21,500-cr in India's deepest gas find
16 March 2017 5:05 PM GMT
State-owned ONGC will invest over Rs 21,500 crore to develop India's deepest gas discovery by 2022-23, helping it more than double output from its prime KG basin block.
Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), which had last year firmed up an investment of Rs 34,012 crore ($5.076.37 billion) in bringing to production 10 oil and gas discoveries in its Bay of Bengal block KG-DWN-98/2 (KG-D5), plans to invest another Rs 21,528.10 crore ($3.2 billion) in developing the ultra-deepsea UD-1 find.
"We have submitted to the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons a declaration of commerciaility (DoC) for the UD-1 find. We will submit a final investment plan, called the field development plan, by end-2017 and hope to bring the discovery to production by 2022-23," ONGC Director (Offshore) Tapas Kumar Sengupta said.
ONGC plans to drill nine wells on the discovery that lies in water depths of 2,400-3,200 metres and will produce a peak output of 19 million standard cubic metres per day.
The company had previously decided to develop other discoveries in KG-D5 block and leave the UD-1 find in the same block for a later date as it thought there was no technology available to produce gas from such water depths.
Sengupta said that there are consultants who have showed to ONGC that discoveries deeper than UD-1 have been put to production in recent times, particularly in Gulf of Mexico. "A recent expression of interest (EoI) meeting we had for developing the KG finds saw several consultants offering solutions for such water depths," he said.
ONGC is in the process of appointing a consultant who will assist in developing the UD-1 discovery.
The 7,294.6 sq km deepsea KG-D5 block, which sits next to Reliance Industries' flagging KG-D6 fields, has been broadly categorised into Northern Discovery Area (NDA - 3,800.6 sq km) and Southern Discovery Area (SDA - 3,494 sq km).
The NDA has 11 oil and gas discoveries while SDA has the nation's only ultra-deepsea gas find of UD-1. These finds have been clubbed into three groups - Cluster-1, Cluster-II and Cluster-III. PTI
May shift proposed basin from Tripura to Assam
State-owned ONGC may shift its proposed new basin to Cachar in Assam from Agartala, where initial work had already begun last year. The ONGC board is likely to take a decision on the upcoming second basin of North East in the next six months. "Cachar has lot of accrues, but the area is less explored. So we are looking at the possibility of setting up the basin in Cachar and may shift it from Agartala," ONGC Director (Onshore) Ved Prakash Mahawar said here. He, however, clarified that no final decision has been taken yet on shifting the proposed basin to Assam. Asked by when a decision is expected, Mahawar said: "The Board may decide on this in the next six months."
In December last year, the Director had said that ONGC was working to launch a new basin in Agartala by the end of this year to focus more on exploration of oil and gas in North East.
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